How Fast Can China Go?

The world’s great powers have long declared themselves through their rail lines—think the 20th Century Limited, the Flying Scotsman, or the Orient Express—and on June 30 the Chinese made their bid for supremacy, with the first official run of a $32 billion high-speed line between Shanghai and Beijing. Faster (820 miles in 288 minutes) and sleeker than any other, the needle-nosed CRH380A symbolizes China’s accelerating pace, even as it faces questions about safety, and taps into an ancient rivalry with Japan. Simon Winchester was on board.

THEY’VE BEEN WORKING ON THE RAILROAD High-speed trains at the Rainbow Bridge (“Hongqiao”) Station, in Shanghai: three CRH380As and, third from front, a CRH3C.

All month she had been practicing, standing for hours in front of the bathroom mirror in her tiny Shanghai flat, delicately gripping a chopstick sideways between her teeth as her supervisor had instructed her, and, by dint of some nimble dental gymnastics with it, learning how to smile in precisely the way that China High-Speed Railways had officially demanded of their new stewardesses. Make an Eight-Teeth Smile: that was the phrase; that was the order.

It took work: long hours, aching jaws, but gradually this pretty artifice of sincerity and amity became second nature to her—such that by June 30, the eve of the 90th anniversary of the founding of her country’s Communist Party (the Youth League of which she was a proud member), the 20-year-old Huang Yun had her Eight-Teeth Smile and her welcome face finally down pat and was nervously ready for her big day.

She stood before her approving parents in the doorway, primed to go: her back ramrod-straight, just like the soldiers outside the Forbidden City—who, unlike her, never smiled—her makeup flawless, her purple-and-white uniform impeccably ironed, her yellow-and-blue silk scarf neatly tied, her pumps gleaming, her cap, with its tiny red railroad badge, tilted forward just so.

An hour-long taxi ride later, and thus tricked out as a traveling ambassador like no other, Miss Huang presented herself at Platform 1 of her city’s vast, ultra-modern glass-and-steel Rainbow Bridge Station, ready at last to greet her passengers on the first official run of what would be the fastest, sleekest, and most peculiarly emblematic express train in China, between the immense southeastern city of Shanghai and the capital, Beijing—and, as the latest symbol of her country as the global supernova, the best train in the world.

Great railway expresses—and the gigantic iron cathedrals between which they journey—have long stood sentry, worldwide, for national achievement and collective pride. Think of the 20th Century Limited and its long red carpet laid out nightly at Grand Central Terminal, a train all America loved. Think of the Flying Scotsman and the Golden Arrow and the Orient Express. The Deccan Queen. The Blue Train. The Master Cutler. Think of the Trans-Siberian Express—eight days of samovars and coal smoke and babushkas wielding ice hammers to free the brakes, and all to reassure Muscovites that Vladivostok, roughly 6,000 miles away, was part of the czar’s Russian empire, too.

By chance I made my first railway venture into China by way of this eastern corner of the Russian Empire 35 years ago. I had paid £300 (more than $2,500 in today’s dollars) for a first-class ticket from Platform 9 at Liverpool Street in London to Platform 2, Kowloon Station, in Hong Kong. It was a winter adventure of fascinating tedium. When eventually, after a week of endless snow and pine barrens, we crossed from the Siberian steppes into Mao Tse-tung’s fiefdom, I was immediately charmed by my first impression of China Railways. The station staff somehow knew that I was the only Englishman aboard, and they saw to it that, as a welcome gift, the Cockneys’ old wartime favorite “Roll Out the Barrel”was played over the platform loudspeakers.

Music has long been part of train culture in China. Each time one of the long-haul expresses pulled out of what we then, back in the 80s, called Peking Station, bound for the mountains of the distant West or the ports of the jungle South, songs triumphal or sentimental were broadcast: the martial “The East Is Red” was played for trains destined for historic cities such as Xi’an and Chengdu, the more saccharine “Fishing Junks at Sunset” for the expresses that rumbled down to the coast. Lately the trains bound for Tibet have been awarded a siren song, too: “Highway to Heaven,” composed by one of China’s best-known divas and sung by a fetching Lhasan lady with a greater octave range than Yma Sumac.

But until recently it had to be admitted that the music was just about the best part of a railway journey in China, the trains themselves being fairly dismal. Once in a while a magnificent steam engine might pull the green slabs of Soviet-style carriages in the rake and thereby lend it some style: until 1988 a factory not far from Peking still turned out one brand-new steam locomotive every day, though most of them were sent down to Dar es Salaam to haul copper out of Africa.

Most often, it was an olive-green diesel engine at the train’s head, an ugly and powerful thing with big shoulders and a yellow-striped snout, and the thousands who rode behind it were wedged into seats designated only as Hard or Soft, or else Soft Sleeper class, which had bunks and antimacassars and a loudspeaker in the ceiling that proved impossible to turn off, other than by cutting the wires, which provoked among the train staff a major sense-of-humor failure each time I did it.

Nevertheless, and despite the shabby populism of the old trains, the Chinese get all soppy over their railways, just as the Indians on the far side of the Himalayas do. They love their trains, they admire them, they ride them in their millions, and because they have historically been so dramatically difficult to build—a mountain tunnel every couple of miles on the lines out of Kunming, elaborate devices installed to stop the roadbed from melting and turning into oatmeal in the high passes up to Tibet (where initially no Chinese engine had the necessary power: only American engines, made by G.E. in Erie, Pennsylvania, could do the work)—they also revere them, intensely.

And so, on the eve of the Communist Party’s big birthday this year, the Chinese displayed their reverence in dignified abundance—though not, oddly enough, with any kind of musical fanfare. The northbound Beijing Express No. G2—with Miss Huang smiling winningly in the V.I.P. compartments at center stage—pulled out of Rainbow Bridge Station, Shanghai, at three P.M. on June 30 without orchestral fanfare, but with all the conjoined pride of the Chinese nation riding with it.

Ticket to Ride

For this one train it had been famously difficult to get tickets. China Railways is an organ of the state and until lately hasn’t been known for customer service. The opening of the flagship 820-mile-long JingHu line (Jing for Beijing, Hu for Shanghai, oddly) was announced last spring—a year earlier than planned—but repeated Railway Ministry statements this summer would say only that the first train would leave “before July 1,” and nothing more.

Public irritation grew throughout June as special test trains and press trains and V.I.P. trains and Wi-Fi-checking trains zipped up and down the line, but all of them without paying passengers. The clutch of airlines which fly the route in 90 minutes, and which trembled at the competition but had no idea when or how they would have to begin dealing with it, began to show their anger. Commentary in China’s increasingly robust vernacular press grew ever more irritated. The public clamor for tickets soon became a positive frenzy, until, with six days to go, there came a brief announcement from Beijing: tickets for the high-speed expresses would go on sale at precisely nine A.M. on Friday, June 24.

And so they did, and such was the frenzy that all were gone—1,066 tickets on G2, the northbound train, and another 1,066 on G1, which would leave Beijing at three P.M. for Shanghai, with the trains due to pass each other at the halfway mark, north of the Yangtze River—within a scant 20 minutes.

To be sure that Rob Howard the photographer and I got aboard the very first train, our heroic assistant had risen at four A.M.—with the street sweepers, dog-walkers, and early joggers, much as in New York—to be told at five A.M. by the station ticket office that it wasn’t going to be selling tickets, but that 12 drugstore outlets dotted around the sprawling city would be doing so instead. She found one of them, marked with a China Rail logo, at six A.M., lined up behind a forlorn child who said she merely wanted general information (at six A.M.?) about the price of sleeper trains to Chongqing, saw the line behind her swell to about a hundred people by seven A.M., began to fend off TV crews and busy-bee newspaper reporters at eight A.M., counted out her 8,055 Chinese renminbi ($1,250), and by 8:45 A.M. had Rob’s U.S. and my British passports and her Chinese ID card at the ready.

At nine A.M., to the electronically timed millisecond, the young woman in the booth switched on her computer, printed out three tickets for our northbound V.I.P.-class seats (1,750 renminbi each—$270) on the inaugural G2 six days hence, and three mere first-class seats (935 renminbi; second-class were half that) for the return train the following day, and then snapped her guichet window shut.

“All tickets sold,” she barked in a manner reminiscent of the bad old days in China, when everything either included the word mei-o— which meant “No,” “There isn’t,” “We haven’t,” “Not available,” “Run out,” “Go away”—or else ended with the explanation “The man with the key is not here,” which meant much the same thing. Here there was no mei-o—just a realization, through the sudden, system-wide demand for tickets, that the fastest train in the world was about to prove very popular, too popular for its own good, perhaps, at least on day one.

Not long ago it seemed as though China was full of shabby nothing; this morning it was full of glittering everything, and the trouble was that everyone wanted it.

Rainbow Connection

Shanghai’s Rainbow Bridge Station is sited next to the city’s old (but newly rebuilt) domestic airport and in a fast-growing nexus of skyscrapers, restaurants, and subway lines (the city had no subway lines until 1995 and now has 11, each one built deeper than the last). The station is run by a woman, Bao Zhenghong. She is a little under 40, pretty, brisk, friendly, with a blue diamond-shaped badge of authority (over dozens of men, at least) on the sleeve of her no-nonsense uniform blouse. As she paced down the concourse marble she remarked, between shy grins and blushes, that she had started work as a menial at a suburban station 20 years ago, on graduation from technical school. She could not in her wildest dreams, she said, have imagined being so swiftly promoted to take total control of this $2.3 billion glass monument (built in only two years) to China’s newness. Hers is the largest station in Asia, with 60 platforms: it sees 250,000 passengers a day, is made of 80,000 tons of steel, is home to countless stores and restaurants and viewing galleries, and is powered by the biggest solar-panel array in creation.

Miss Bao earns only $900 a month, hardly within a whisper of her country’s growing battalions of millionaires, but she’s proud nonetheless: A young woman like me, she gestured at the echoing immensity, standing under a football-field-size electronic display flickering with train information. Who could have believed it?

But behind her was a red silk banner, which was half the station’s width, and which probably granted her all the credibility she needed. It was a banner displaying a 100-yard-long sentence in large Chinese characters, a reminder of the underpinning ethos of a country that to many seems merely—but probably wrongly—a capitalist juggernaut, spinning wildly toward an improbable future. The sign was old-school politburo propaganda, the kind of rhetoric that once blared interminably down from loudspeakers in every factory and village commune in the country. It displayed for the ideological benefit of everyone in her station a sober exhortation, one that most station workers know by heart: LET US ALL WORK HARD TO HARNESS THE GOOD OF TECHNOLOGICAL ACHIEVEMENT TO CREATE THE FINEST RAILWAY IN THE WORLD FOR THE ULTIMATE BETTERMENT OF THE CHINESE PEOPLE. Miss Bao grinned. Perhaps that is why an achievement like hers is more believable.

By now, up on the departure board, the flashing lights against Train G2 were starting to pulse red. Our escort gestured: it was time to pass through the phalanx of lights and cameras and security barriers at the top of the Platform 1 escalators—the tickets swishing in a flash of an eye into the machine’s electronic maw with so much less ceremony than that attending their purchase—and descend to the platform, where the great train was waiting.

I think I had probably never seen in my lifetime so clean and shining a wall of titanium white—an arrow-straight tube of brilliantly just-polished carriages, with a long swoosh of tinted glass, and a jet streak of vivid blue beneath, extended both ways along the platform as far as the eye could see. Outside each open pneumatic door stood a young uniformed woman, hands clasped before her, smiling broadly, confidently. This is railway majesty, the women seemed to say in unison. This is where China is going—welcome aboard!

I walked to the end of the platform and up to the quietly humming electric locomotive, around which crowded scores of awestruck passengers wanting to be pictured standing beside its long, anteater-like silver-gray snout. I was relieved to see it was indeed the locomotive that had been promised by the line’s early planners—the needle-nosed, space-rocket-look-alike, almost science-fictional CRH380A, designed in China (after engineers had bought and operated and shamelessly copied from other high-speed trains from Japan and France, and most notably from the Siemens company in Germany) and built in a factory in eastern China, in the same province where Confucius had been born.

Half a dozen of these beasts were lined up beside one another, raring to go, like greyhounds at the starting gate waiting for the rabbit. One snubbier-nosed CRH3C engine was huddled between the others—German-engineered, slower, but (as one English-speaking man on the platform remarked to me, boastfully) still faster than anything known in America today.

The new, aardvark-nosed 380As were the pride of the fleet, designed and ordered at a stupendous rate: a prototype was built in late 2008, there were test runs in 2009, the delivery of the first took place in 2010, and then, at a cost of $6.64 billion, 140 of the train sets (a hundred with 16 cars, like ours, and 40 with just 8 cars, for shorter-haul expresses) were ordered and pressed into immediate service during the 12 months following. It felt as though our train were still warm from the makers’ welding torches.

The fantastic sums of money assigned, the astonishing speed of manufacturing, the sudden arrival of these behemoths, the trains now so firmly annealed into the canon of popular Chinese culture—to Westerners, who have to endure regulatory tedium and budget delays, what is happening in China simply beggars belief.

Bound for Glory

There was a sudden cascade of high-pitched warning beeps—90 seconds until takeoff!—and we all scattered down the platform for our respective doorways, like hunted rabbits looking for burrows. Miss Huang grinned broadly as we ran through her doors. “Do not worry!” she breathed as she settled me down gently into a red leather airline seat (“It costs $20,000,” she said reverently. “More than most cars, would you believe?”), handed me an ice-cold towel, and positively exhaled an air of relaxation, like a spa attendant handing out cucumber slices. “Wipe your brow. We go now.”

And so, with that, the station and the waiting crowds seen through the picture windows began to slip, quite silently, away. We swept out, in utter quiet, and with an imperturbable sense of purpose, bound as we were for China’s capital city, 820 miles away. When I first took this train, 20 years ago, the journey took a little more than a day. In May this journey would have taken 10 hours. Today it would take less than five.

Moreover—and as many of this day’s riders would remark—we were farther away from Beijing than New York is from Chicago, and yet while the normal Amtrak run from the Hudson to Lake Michigan takes 19 hours (though once, returning from a Bob Dylan concert, it took me three days, two of them stuck in a snowbank in northern Indiana), here in China this even longer journey could be measured in more appropriate units: it would take just 288 minutes. Four hours and 48 minutes. A quarter of the time it takes today to get to Chicago, and less than half the time that it used to take to get to Beijing.

Within seconds we were out into the hazy sunshine, slithering snake-like out from under the cover of the train shed. There was a small, nudging swerve to the right as we clicked over a switch and moved from the filigree of terminus lines onto our dedicated high-speed track, and seconds later there came a faint feeling of pressure in the small of the back, a sort of parental guiding-hand feel, a sensation reminiscent of when the Concorde switched on its afterburners. It was the train’s mighty YQ-365 electric motors spooling up to full speed and beginning to show off the enormous accelerative power which is their most remarkable feature.

This, after all, is the fastest production train in the world. The configuration of 16 cars that is usual for the high-prestige train to the Chinese capital has reached speeds of more than 300 m.p.h. on the test track: from a standing start it can reach cruising speed in seven minutes. “I wouldn’t stand up if I were you!” someone said, laughing, but at the time she was pouring a glass of orange juice for me, and she set it down brimful on my seat table. There was hardly a ripple on its surface, not a drop spilled, nor, as we pushed ever forward, even the suggestion that its meniscus would break under the curiously gentle press of the engines’ thrust. It was as though we were all pinioned in a cocoon of silent speed, with only the countryside flashing past at a blinding rate indicating just how incredibly fast this really was. And the gauge above each carriage door, reporting our speed in kilometers per hour: someone clapped as we passed the 300 mark, and the number kept on climbing. So like the cabin of the Concorde: so fast, indeed, that it might as well have been a Mach number.

In just half an hour we were wafting through Suzhou—China’s Venice, some say, because of all its canals and bridges and reputedly the most beautiful women in the land, and a place usually half a weekend day away from Shanghai. Twenty minutes later, I was paying particular attention to our approach to the vinegar-making city of Zhejiang, just south of the Yangtze, because I wanted to note, just for historical amusement, the precise point where our new railway line crossed the Grand Canal.

It had happened that the day before I had managed to get to the canal itself, by car—a long and tortuous journey deep into the countryside, but one rewarded eventually by the sight of the ancient waterway spearing its way northward through the paddy fields and brick factories and pig farms for which the southern-Chinese countryside is best known.

The Grand Canal, which runs between the cities of Hangzhou and Beijing, is fantastically old—portions were built in the fifth century B.C.—and it has been allowing large vessels to pass between southern China and the national capital for almost 2,000 years. When finally I found it, squadrons of barges were moving ponderously along it by the hundreds. Underneath the brand-new railway bridge I found one of the barges, empty, waiting for a load of bricks. The boat’s owner, a thin man named Au Jianyao, was sitting on the prow chatting with his wife, watching his young boy playing on the deck. Once in a while there would be a whoosh from above, and a sleek white express would hurtle by, leaving a brief warm gust of wind in its wake. “Amazing, the new China” was all he said. The barges beside him moved along, five miles an hour at most, as they have done for scores of centuries past.

This being the train’s first run, there were TV crews aboard, mostly from Nanjing, the halfway point and one of only three stops. We were the only *lao-weis—*foreigners—aboard and were, not surprisingly, singled out for attention. What do you think of our train? was invariably the first question. Could you achieve such a thing in America? the second. And then, most pointedly of all: How does it compare to the trains in Japan?

One can sympathize with people from Nanjing wanting to ask about Japan and its Shinkansen bullet train, which for decades was the best-known symbol of the country’s economic might. After all, perhaps no city in the world suffered more from the cruel attentions of Japanese forces than Nanjing did, in the infamous 1937 massacre that is still known as the Rape of Nanking.

The physical scars of that orgy of cruelty are all gone now: the city is a modern glass-and-blinking-neon fantasy, just like most of the great new Chinese conurbations, of which no fewer than 171 now have populations of more than a million (Nanjing has eight million). Only in the museums and the memories of the old and the educated is there much awareness of the horrors of 1937.

Certainly Miss Huang, beaming proudly across at her colleagues who waited in perfect chorus-girl formation on the platform to greet us as our train swept silently into the brand-new and all-white Nanjing High Speed station, gave no hint that she had arrived in a city with so tragic a past. She evidently cared much more about showing those waiting how splendid her train was, and like all youngsters in modern China she seemed to prefer to be caught up in the dizzying spiral toward tomorrow, rather than be bogged down by the trials of yesterday.

However, the question of Japan figured prominently in all the TV interviews that day, and it lurked persistently in the background in just about all of the newspaper articles and commentaries that I saw around the inauguration of the great new express. The train might have been wonderful, but beyond the adulation and amazement, there was always Japan, the she-elephant in the room. How does our train compare to Japan’s? people asked. And, more generally, are we as good as Japan now? Might we even be better?

The Great Train Rivalry

It is impossible to exaggerate China’s fretful psychological rivalry with Japan, the small group of offshore islands that for so long—and, in China’s view, so impudently—has been so visibly in the vanguard of Asia’s economic jamboree. A cast-iron determination by China to regain her own ancient regional standing—her Tang-dynasty glory, for instance, when she was the grandest, cleverest, most sophisticated and scientifically advanced nation on earth, and when Japan and Korea were mere feudalities and satrapies, of little significance to any but themselves—has underpinned all of China’s aspirations since the last World War.

Her progress hampered initially by the undertow of Communist ideology, of course, by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution most especially, China has accelerated almost exponentially since the brakes were released in the 80s and has gained all of the lost ground. Nowadays the Middle Kingdom is beginning not just to bestride Asia, not just to best her great rival Japan, but to enjoy an immeasurably important standing, verging on absolute supremacy, over the entire world.

On all kinds of measurable levels, from the trivial (piano ownership, Wi-Fi penetration, Starbucks outlets, pole-dancing studios) to the more truly significant (freeway construction, space exploration, patent-application numbers, Ph.D. candidates, military reach, currency reserves, debt ownership), China is positioning itself to outstrip everyone, regionally and globally. (An English-language sign outside her main space center, at Jiuquan—the town where rhubarb was reportedly first grown—says, WITHOUT HASTE. WITHOUT FEAR. CHINA WILL RULE THE WORLD.)

Not surprisingly, then, given its very specific role as a source and symbol of national pride, the country’s railway network has been a showcase of China’s efforts to achieve global primacy.

When she has finished building in 2012 what she began only in 2004, China will have more high-speed rail lines than the rest of the world put together. It goes without saying that China’s 42 dedicated near-arrow-straight, near-perfectly-level lines, with their 8,000 miles of 220-m.p.h.-capable track (half of it already built, and at a total predicted cost of nearly $400 billion), shame into insignificance America’s achievements and aims, where the fastest train reaches only 125 m.p.h., and that only on short stretches of track near Baltimore, and where the total length of planned, but thus far unbuilt, high-speed-capable rail is a laughable 563 miles.

But it is not just comparison with America that is so dramatic and so dire. The Chinese system also looks far more impressive—in terms of both mileage and projected speed—than systems that are either built or planned in all the other countries that have so far drunk the high-speed Kool-Aid: Spain, France, Germany, and Italy in particular all have networks of which they are rightly proud, and which draw crowds of travelers. But these systems were hugely expensive to build, and none of them, most significantly, make money.

But Japan is different. Japan’s railway systems do make money. The 320-mile bullet train connecting Tokyo and Osaka, the so-called Tokaido Shinkansen Line, has been in operation since 1964; it runs at 170 m.p.h., with a train every 20 minutes. It has so far carried almost five billion passengers, and is not just the flagship for high-speed rail worldwide but the most heavily traveled passenger train route on the planet. The food is splendid—though it is hard to go wrong with Japanese bento boxes—and the ever bowing staff are endlessly courteous. The schedules are maintained, almost to the second. There has never been a fatality on a moving Shinkansen train. And to cap it all, the Tokaido line has been making profits—lots of profits, allowing it to both cover its Compared with this, China High Speed Rail evidently has work to do. For although the trains are very fast, and although young ladies like Miss Huang have been instructed on how to smile impeccably, and though our own arrivals at the gleaming stations in Nanjing, Jinan, and Tianjin and at our soaring terminus station of Beijing South were all on time—ahead of time, in fact—and although the cars were initially full, there are aspects of China High Speed Rail that are wanting, and others that are rather worrisome.

The food, for example, is grisly—microwaved, tasteless, sheathed in plastic. It is difficult to get a drink on board, and when you can, beer only. The service outside the very costly V.I.P. car is frankly indifferent (we traveled back first-class, a sort of economy-plus) and seems tinctured with that air of entitled resentment that is so very evident in most Communist states. The Wi-Fi experiment evidently failed, for communication is poor, and the shouting of Chinese businessmen (who have developed shouting into something of an art form) into their cell phones proved for me a perpetual distraction, matched only by that of the small armies of howling babies who unaccountably also needed to take the Beijing express.

The cleanliness of the moderately priced cars left something to be desired, too. Cultural attitudes toward personal space—litter, chicken bones, soda cans—which may be fine on a country line in Yunnan, where you share with goats and chickens and pay just a handful of dollars for the privilege, may not be entirely acceptable on high-speed expresses between China’s major cities.

In the first week of service, there were breakdowns: one train simply stopped working, and on the run to Suzhou there was an electrical failure, and a whole slew of trains (the plan was that at rush hour there would be a departure each way every five minutes) were stopped for a full afternoon, to much embarrassment and apology.

But these are small matters, probably easy to improve upon and cure. What is less easy to deal with is very much more troubling: the evident amount of official corruption currently being unearthed in the story of the lines’ construction; the growing worry about whether too much borrowed money has been budgeted too quickly for the construction program; and a fresh suspicion that corners may have been cut in order to bring the high-prestige lines, like the Beijing service, which positively streaks over its closing miles to the capital, into service too quickly. In the rush to show the world how magnificent China’s achievement is, some passengers’ safety, in other words, may well have been compromised.

Tracks of My Fears

Corruption has claimed victims already, and there have been sudden firings and resignations. No less a figure than the railways minister, the 58-year-old Liu Zhijun, the man most publicly associated with the high-speed network’s construction, was abruptly fired last February and is currently awaiting trial. In particular he is thought to have authorized huge payments to an old girlfriend named Ding Shumiao, who owns a company that makes items such as noise shields that are placed beside railway lines in highly populated areas: in return for his lining of Madame Ding’s pockets, she would allegedly supply the minister with girls for his apparently prodigious sexual appetite.

The immediate consequence of the minister’s removal and Madame Ding’s ministrations was bizarre: all the high-speed trains were promptly ordered to slow down. Engineers on our Beijing-Shanghai line, on which trains were known to be capable of running at 250 m.p.h. and were initially supposed to perform the journey in under four hours, were told to keep the speed down to 180 m.p.h., and to tell passengers to expect a transit time of just under five hours.

But why? The corruption allegations against Liu and Madame Ding and other high-level officials and supply-company bosses prompted some bureaucrats to suspect Liu may have allowed builders (as many as 100,000 were engaged to build our new line alone) to use cheap and substandard materials: hardening agents may have been omitted from concrete poured for the roadbed, meaning that over the years the rails may buckle, and the amount of fly ash used to harden concrete pillars may have been cut, meaning that some pillars could well crumble under the relentless pounding of the expresses.

So alarmed was Liu’s successor as minister, Sheng Guangzu, that he demanded the train speeds be cut until the integrity of the infrastructure could be fully confirmed, and until public and ministry confidence in the railway system could be assured. To have an accident on a high-speed railway line would be catastrophic for China’s image, and with today’s combative and truculent press, and the cunning Internet community, it is very doubtful that even so secretive a government as Communist China’s could keep such a disaster under wraps for long.

Nor did they, when, a scant three weeks after the inauguration of our train, an express from the very same Rainbow Bridge Station in Shanghai, en route to the southern city of Wenzhou, collided at full speed with another high-speed train that had stalled in a thunderstorm after an electrical failure, and fell a hundred feet off a viaduct. Thirty-nine died—two Americans among them—and more than 200 were injured. It was precisely the kind of prestige-ruining disaster that had been feared, and the reaction to it—when, true to form, the Chinese government began lying about what they soon called “the July 23 incident” (much as they term the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre “the June 4 incident”), and tried to bury the wrecked train cars in giant pits beside the bridge—was predictably hostile.

The Chinese blogosphere in particular was incensed: within a week more than 26 million tweets (or weibos, as they are called in China) had been posted, variously demanding help, excoriating the government, accusing propagandists of lying, and exposing underhand activity (such as the burying of the train cars, which were hastily dug up again, and official attempts to limit the victims’ rights to legal representation, a decision that was also suddenly reversed). Whatever the effect on the railway, the effect of the crash on the relationship between the grim men of the Politburo and China’s Web-connected citizenry has been massive.

And not surprisingly there are jitters. There were even before the crash. Just after Minister Liu’s dismissal Yoshiyuki Kasai, chairman of the Central Japan Railway Company, said, “I don’t think the Chinese are paying the same attention to safety that we are. Pushing it that close to the limit is something that we would never do.”

And the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, published a remark by a railway engineer in Shaanxi Province last May, to the effect that he would refuse to ride on the high-speed trains—earning him an official party rebuke for “lacking courage.” The notion that one might require courage to ride on an express train is precisely what the fickle—and cost-conscious—Chinese traveling public does not want to hear. Especially when a ticket on a fast intercity train can cost, for an unskilled worker, up to a week’s wages: for him, fast must equate to convenient, and safe.

Journey’s End

By now the brakes were taking hold, doing so as silently as the rest of the operation of this remarkable train: the only way you could tell was by the descent in the speed indicator above the carriage door. Miss Huang was still smiling broadly, though I sensed now in slightly forced fashion, as she had just been told she would not stay overnight in the Chinese capital city, but would have to return to Shanghai that evening, and by a slower train, to be ready for the full-on service the next day.

She confessed to being a little downcast at not being able to spend time in her country’s capital. But she would be up again, I said, and soon. With an initial plan for 90 trains in each direction each day, and all of them probably—it is hoped—filled to bursting, she would have to employ and deploy her charms with a certain rigor, for sure, but as reward would get to see her capital very many times.

We stopped softly, as if we had run into a wall of goose down. The doors swished open, letting in a soggy carpet of hot stale station air. The girls all stood ramrod-straight, like the soldiers at Tiananmen Square, to bid us farewell. I said my good-byes, to Huang Yun most especially, and then edged out into the great river of the fast-departing crowds, walking steadily away from the ghostlike white express, the exterior of which even now was being swarmed over by a cleaning crew, all middle-aged women armed with squeegees and hand towels.

I found the exit gate and tried to put into its electronic slot my hard-won ticket from the morning. It was rejected, a horn sounded, and lights flashed angrily. “Mei-o,” said an official harshly, waving us away and down into a grubby corridor to another exit. “Not working.”

That first night off the train I spent in the China Club, an ancient courtyard house a mile or so from the station. It is a small 300-year-old mansion, all red lanterns and private courtyards and hanging silks and tapestries and dark bentwood furniture quite unchanged since the middle years of the Qing dynasty.

When the house was built, Chinese women’s feet were still bound, there were concubines and eunuchs, and if the emperor passed by, all subjects fell to the ground, performing the kowtow, daring not to gaze at the celestial presence. Yet back then China was seen in the burgeoning West as a place of seemingly little relevance on the world stage: a “booby nation,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, a nation good for the making of silk, ceramics, rhubarb, and tea, and little else.

How much has changed! For those of us who look on China from afar, the changes are dramatic and obvious. But, for the Chinese themselves, proud of their so ancient lineage and their cherished customs and traditions, they are surely experiencing change at such a rate that some can barely know who they are. More than a few must be mystified and bemused to be told to learn to smile by placing chopsticks between their teeth, and to stand up ramrod-straight, like foot soldiers in a strange new army, marching relentlessly but uncertainly—and now, on occasion, dangerously—into their uncharted future.